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A bring your own device policy for employee smartphones may make sense financially and it may make employees happy, but it does expose an accounting firm to cyberrisk. This article looks at ways firms can neutralize that risk by following common-sense measures.

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Enterprises need to get ahead of rising employee demand for using their own devices at work, setting IT policies on such use, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes writes. At the same time, employees must seriously consider whether they really should use personal devices for work tasks, given the privacy and security issues involved. "The bottom line is that BYOD can and does work, but it is, at best, a pre-prepared compromise struck between employer and employee, with the employer holding the upper hand in most cases," Kingsley-Hughes writes.

Executives forced to deal with their employees' bad mobile habits are experimenting with a variety of approaches to minimize risky behavior, ranging from paying incentives to workers who follow best practices to resorting to the "kill switch" for those who don't. Studies have found that BYOD can be a security nightmare for companies -- with more than 40% of employees in a Centrify survey admitting to accessing sensitive data on unsecured networks. Two-thirds of workers in an AdaptiveMobile study, however, said they would leave their devices at home if their bosses had the power to shut them down, so experts say employers need to be careful when choosing the stick over the carrot.

A survey conducted by KnowB4.com found that more than half of responding organizations said they are unprepared for a breach related to "bring your own device" policies. Half of the organizations also said that hacks into employees' and corporate-owned devices might have occurred in the previous 12 months and gone undetected, the survey found.

Some enterprises are rethinking the bring-your-own-device strategy and are instead opting to buy smartphones for employees, according to a report from research firm Strategy Analytics, which found a 34% jump in corporate purchases compared with a year ago. Analysts did not say whether they expect the trend to continue or if it was just a blip. They did indicate more companies are concerned about security and management issues involved with enabling employees to use their personal handsets at work.

The cost of supporting multiple mobile devices used by employees is a concern of IT professionals, a survey indicates. More than half of respondents said they expect to pay more for mobile-data roaming this year. Enterprise support increased for iOS and Android devices last year, while fewer organizations supported BlackBerry smartphones.